In the mining field, and in other fields in which large volumes of material are collected and removed from a work site, it is typical to employ industrial machines that include large dippers for shoveling the material from the work site. Industrial machines, such as electric rope or power shovels, draglines, etc., are used to execute digging operations to remove the material from, for example, a bank of a mine. These industrial machines generally include counterweight structures added to the rear end of the machine, the counterweight structures being used to balance the machine during operations of the machine.
The current counterweight structures of many industrial machines include a large counterweight box having a plurality of openings on the top of the counterweight box. Operators manually dispense ballast from large barrels into the plurality of openings positioned on the top of the counterweight box. After the counterweight box is filled with the ballast, the openings on the top of the counterweight box are welded shut. Filling the counterweight box is performed before a rear room of the machine is installed on top of the counterweight box. Therefore, assembly of the rear room and the rest of the machine is halted until the entire counterweight box is filled with ballast.
The current counterweight structures of many industrial machines also include counterweight casting slabs bolted and/or welded to the rear end of the counterweight box. These casting slabs tend to break and fall off during the operation of the machine, such as when the machine swings to unload material into a loading vehicle and the counterweight box hits the loading vehicle.